We Came to Learn the Sea
by miranda-wave
Summary: They're neither of them quite who they were before, but some ways home from Norway are the same on both sides of the Void. And they still have the one thing they've always had: here and now. Takes place immediately after "Journey's End".


A/N: Things I do not own: Doctor Who, "We Learned the Sea", the real-life ferry between Kristiansand, Norway and Hirtshals, Denmark. Oh well.

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><p><em>And you are still young, so you'll understand<em>

_That the stars of the sea are the same for the land_

_And we came to learn the sea_

[dar williams]

**We Came to Learn the Sea**

It's all a blur, the long, long miles taking them away from Bad Wolf Bay and Rose sitting next to him in the back of the Land Rover. The exhaustion of the day finally shows in the play of winter light across her nose and cheekbones, and he realizes, suddenly, that this is not the Rose he knew. She is not twenty and joyous and invincible; tiny creases around her mouth and eyes betray time, discipline, and a habitual hard set of her face, determined and unyielding. She is not _his _Rose, not really.

On the other hand, he's not exactly one to talk, given the situation.

The silence stretches uncomfortably; Rose keeps looking at him out of the corner of her eye like she has too many things to say and no idea how to say them. He thinks Jackie might be more than a little displeased with him—_again_—and of course the driver Pete negotiated from his counterpart at the Norwegian government's secret Darlig-Ulv Initiative has probably been ordered to say nothing on pain of Retcon. The Doctor's chest feels unbalanced, the disappearance of his time-sense is disorienting, and there is a heavy dazed feeling too that he supposes must be exhaustion. The only anchor, really, is Rose's small hand in his, a fragile bridge spanning the middle seat between them.

"You two alright back there?" Jackie peers at them in the makeup mirror over her seat, brandishing a thermos. "I have tea. Need a cuppa?"

"Tannins and free radicals," Rose giggles suddenly, "just the thing for the synapses." She sucks in a deep breath.

"Well, it worked last time he changed, didn't it? And he's not looking much better now, is he?"

"It's alright, Jackie," the Doctor mumbles. "I'm just—I'm just—" The words break off into a tremendous yawn. "I…I'm tired. Interesting."

"And you last slept when, exactly?"

"He doesn't sleep, Mum," Rose answers for him. "Not really. Or didn't."

Jackie keeps glowering at him in the mirror, so he gives in. "About ten days ago, relative time. Or, the other me—previous me—I've only been around four or five hours, myself."

"Here," she commands, shoving a blanket at him and another at Rose. "I'm gonna give each of you tea—Rose Tyler, don't give me that look, it's tea or a sedative, and don't you forget what _I've _been doing at Torchwood—and you're gonna go to sleep. Now. Understand?"

Rose disentangles her fingers from his to crawl under her blanket, and he tries to fill the bereft space in his hand with the diminutive thermos cup. The hot liquid does help, gives all those new synapses a place to turn. This is what tea tastes like to humans, then. This is what it means to burn your tongue. And this is what happens when Jackie Tyler turns devious, because he's quite sure that if he could still perform chemical analysis by taste, he'd find that she had spiked the stuff.

He manages to push the cup into one of the holders with increasingly slack fingers before letting his arm flop to the seat next to him and his head come to rest on the window glass. The last thing he feels before sleep _(this is what sleep feels like to humans)_ takes him is Rose's fingers curling back around his palm.

* * *

><p>When the Doctor wakes they're clanking up the ramp onto a car ferry and the setting sun is blazing into his eyes. Rose is still curled into her corner, but she's awake, contemplating their entwined hands.<p>

"Where…" he mutters thickly. "Where are we?"

She looks up, meeting his eyes placidly. "Kristiansand. This is the ferry for Denmark."

"That's…that's a long way." He seems to be stuck in a swamp of monosyllables, mucking his way through a mental fog. Is this what a human brain is like?

"You've been asleep for a long time." She shifts in her blanket, angling her body to block the brightest assault of the sun. "Mum drugged you. I'll kill her, really I will."

"Not you?"

"She knows better than to try me. She did once. Wasn't a good day—last time I was here. I nearly pitched her off the boat when I woke up."

"Where 's she?" he slurs.

"Eating smoked herring in the café, probably—Pete's mum's a bad influence for food—and plottin' how to get you around Torchwood's medical team.

"Scary." The Doctor yawns so widely his jaw cracks. "Ow."

"'S Pete's fault, really. Tony got big enough for a nanny and she got bored, started popping in at Torchwood all the time and botherin' Pete's brother. He's in the med lab. Then the stars started goin' out and there were all these witnesses, lots of kids for some reason, and sometimes they'd talk to her even if they were hurt or confused or… One normal woman in all of Torchwood. So Pete hired her secretly and got her trained as a nurse so she could get in to see the patients."

"You mum. In Torchwood."

"Isn't half terrifying, is it?" Rose smiles.

"And they gave her a gun too."

"No, actually, she bribed Mickey and Jake to teach her, and then she _took _the gun and she and Mickey followed me."

"Well, as long as she only points it at Daleks…" he finds himself smiling. It's funny, all those new little muscles in his face, familiar and subtly different.

"She is going to save you several days of humiliatin' medical experiments, so be nice."

"And then what?"

"Well, we'll take you to Pete's mansion, get you some clothes and things, set you up with a place and a job, if you want one. Torchwood would love..."

"Me, working for Torchwood," he says dryly. "That'll be the day."

She eyes him dubiously. "You're sarcastic now."

"That's Donna talking," he says, surprised. "Weird."

"Like new teeth?"

"Sort of. Only…everywhere. About half my genes, probably."

"Suppose I'll get used to it, then." Rose looks away, gaze falling somewhere near the steering wheel. "She…she seemed like a good person. What you needed, after…"

"She was. Is," he amends hastily, because there are really enough elephants in this car already. Thinking about Donna burns in his hearts—heart—but seems to clear his head of the last of the drug's fog. "Rose? Can we go outside?"

She looks at him skeptically. "Can you walk? Mum gave you a pretty stiff dose."

"I'm only mostly human, you know."

"C'mon, then." She opens her door and tugs on his hand, pulling him out behind her and making sure his knees don't collapse when he tries to stand. They make for the door labeled "Til Daek".

"So, anyway," she resumes abruptly, "we'll take you home, Pete will take care of some of the logistics—birth records and NHS numbers and IDs and things—like he did for me, and you can decide what you want to do."

"Names," he murmurs as they open the door and step out onto the windswept platform over the cold cold sea.

"What?" Rose shouts over the chop of waves and whistle of wind.

"He'll want to give me a name," he calls back, wrapping his fingers more tightly into hers and wishing he'd brought his blanket. Apparently it's winter, and he hadn't fully realized the implications of having an internal temperature of 98.6 instead of 75.3.

"No, Doctor." She crowds in closer to him, sharing heat: 98.6. "He'll want you to give yourself a name, or at least somethin' you can put on your papers. You'll always be the Doctor to us. If you want, I mean..."

"John Smith. Noble-Smith, maybe."

She rolls her eyes, and around the corners of them he sees that old familiar look of fond exasperation, the one she and Jack sometimes shared when they thought he wasn't looking, long, long ago. "Sounds like a false name."

"Well, it is. Another one," he muses. "I've found that false names are easier to bear if no one has any illusion that they're real."

"So use your real name, then. Tell people you're from, I dunno, Wales. Or that your parents were mad Americans. Nothin's too strange, especially around Torchwood."

"I…can't. My name is…there is…was…only one time I could tell it to anyone. Although maybe it's just a word now," he replies bitterly, staring blankly at the flickers of fading light across the roiling water. "After all, I'm mostly human. No telepathy."

"One time?"

"One time, one person. It's a…gift, sort of. I'd…I'd rather not go into it now."

They're silent for a moment, the thrum of the boat's engine as it pulls further out into the North Sea filling the space between them.

"Okay," she says finally. It doesn't hide the questions he can almost feel radiating off her, but he appreciates it nonetheless.

"Thank you."

"Does it mean anything, anything you could use to pick a name that's really yours? I mean, like Rose is a flower and Tyler is…is a bloke who makes tiles or something."

"It means me. I mean, really me, here and now. Whenever and wherever I am."

"Oh." Realization dawns on her face. "You've told me that before. At the end of the world. You were angry, and you hardly knew me, but you told me anyway. Who you are. Here and now, that's you."

"I did. And Rose, I meant it." He pauses, wondering whether to push it, and then the scrap of Donna in his head says quite clearly, _of course you push it, Dumbo! You left the bloody _universe _so you could push it, don't you dare run away now. _

Carpe diem. Donna's gift.

"I meant it. This morning too." The bit of TARDIS coral in his pocket seems to grow warmer as he struggles for words. "Here and now, if you want, or...well, if Donna's right we could have a new TARDIS in a few years, and then…"

"I didn't come looking for you to get back to the TARDIS, you know," she interrupts.

"Well," he replies quickly, grasping for his old safe manic mode, "you came _looking _for me because the end of the world was imminent and the Daleks were going to destroy life as we know it and you're the defender of the Earth, or both Earths, apparently. So I don't suppose you had much else—"

"Idiot," she says decisively, but she's still smiling. "I would have come even if the world wasn't ending. _That _just solved our problems with the dimension cannon a bit faster. I came back because you didn't tell me the truth at Bad Wolf Bay."

"What? But I did, I just said—"

"No, the first time. I asked if I'd ever see you again, and you said _you can't_. Every day, two _years_, I remembered that, how you looked when you said it. And I never, ever believed it. I came back for you."

It's on his lips to ask, _is this what you wanted? _But she's already unwrapping his fingers from hers and drawing his arm gently behind her back, settling it in an easy curve around her waist. So he knows: it's not really what either of them wanted, but it's here. Here and now. And the sea between Kristiansand to Hirtshals is nearly the same as it is on that other Earth, the one that felt almost like home.

"Doctor?"

"Rose."

"Thanks. For tellin' me your name."

"But I haven't yet."

"No," she says with a smile, turning to face him. "You haven't, but you've already given me the important part." And she captures his lips with hers, bathed in the gold western light of a new world.


End file.
